Since you’ve landed on this blog, it’s either that you’ve been paying a load-ton of money on Google ads with a minimum $$$ return, or you’re a loyal fan of my content. 🔥
Within 4 min, you’re going to learn how to uplift your Google Ads, and definitely increase ROI. Let’s go 💥
Google Search is a channel to primarily capture people within the “Active Evaluation” stage of the buyer’s journey. This is the stage where people are evaluating their options with the hopes of deciding to buy the product or service in mind.
Below are some reasons why you are not being able to capture or to convert those prospects into customers:
You Have a Weak Keyword List
For Google Search, your keywords are the core of your campaign. It’s the primary targeting mechanism, and if you’re setting up your keywords in 1 hour, you sir are doing it wrong! 🥲
First of all, your keywords should match the buyer’s journey stage of which your prospects are at. Very rarely Google Search ads are used for brand awareness purposes. They are used usually to capture people who are ACTIVELY EVALUATING your product or service.
Usually, when you’re an actively evaluating potential buyer, you’re trying to find the best brand, best price, and best deal, so your keywords should reflect this “intention-based” behavior accordingly.
Once you grasp a good understanding of those keywords, use them as phrase or exact matches to avoid paying for irrelevant combinations of your keywords.
You’re Not Using Search Terms
Since your keywords are not always set as “exact match”, there are some variation of your keywords which are triggering your ads once they are searched. 👨🏽💻
These search variations are called “search terms”. For example, if you have “electric fan” as a phrase match keyword, your ad will be triggered when someone searched “electric fan price”, although it is not precisely your keyword, Google considers it as a search term worth triggering your ad.
This is good for you to establish a better understanding on your prospects search behavior, and will help you as well take a decision on whether you should add these search terms as keywords and allocate a worthy bid if applicable.
You Don’t Have a Negative Keywords List
A negative keywords list will make sure that your ads are not triggered for a selection of keywords which are exactly matched as provided to google.
Here’s an example:
If you’re running a campaign for a big brand such as Microsoft, you would definitely have “Microsoft” as a keyword, but you don’t want the ad to show when someone searches “Microsoft jobs” because it would be capturing people who are not within the buyer’s journey.
This is where you populate your negative keywords list with such search terms to avoid paying for these irrelevant clicks.
Search Partners Are Generating Low Quality Clicks
Google search partners are a selection of websites and other search engines which are not common across the world and have partnered with Google so that they can feature ads and generate revenue.
Often these search partners are automatically selected when setting up a campaign, and Google would use these channels to trigger your ads once your keywords are searched on those channels. As advertisers, we sometimes don’t take this into consideration. 😅
We consider that all the ads will be shown only on google.com, but it is not the case if you select the search partners checkbox within the campaign settings.
If you find that Google search partners have been receiving a lot of clicks and a low number of conversions you are better of unchecking this option from your campaign settings so that you would be spending more on keywords searched on google.com specifically.
Headline Copy Isn’t Selling
Writing a Google ad copy can be a very sophisticated topic, but overall your Google ads should cover the following four points:
Address the Pain:
You have to communicate with your prospects on what potentially they are going through in order to buy your product or service. What is the pain that they are facing which has helped them decide on this specific product and has pushed them to evaluate their options?
Clarify the Gain:
Make sure to mention what will your prospect gain from buying this product from you. This can be a discount, better service, or any added value which you are planning to position yourself with in this campaign.
Highlight the Claim:
Your ad has to abruptly mention how your offer or product or service can be claimed. This is done through having a very clear call-to-action on what is the next step that will happen when you click on the ad.
Communicate the Brain:
Your ad needs to communicate with your prospects in a manner where you are the best value at the current time. You need to push them to take the decision now and to avoid procrastination. This is done by adding elements to your ad copy to activate a FOMO effect or to accelerate the buying decision process.
You’re Not Using Relevant Extensions
Google search ads are more than just headlines and descriptions. There are a collection of Google ad extensions that have been created to enrich your Google ad with different content depending on what your industry is and what you are specifically promoting.
Some of the most common extensions that can be used across almost all businesses are sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, location extensions, and call extensions. The more you add such extensions to your Google ad, Google will improve your quality score, which will help in decreasing your cost per click on your campaign because Google will start trusting your ad more and prioritizing it versus the competition.
Low Quality Score
The quality score is established by the performance of how your keywords drive traffic to your ads, and how your ads are driving traffic to the landing page, and if the traffic generated to the landing page from the ads is generating sales.
The end goal is to make sure that the dots are connected between the Attract, Convert & Close stages. “Attract” is done through the keywords, “Convert” is done through the ads & “Close” is done through the landing page.
These are some common points that would affect a Google Ads Campaign, however, upon auditing many other variables would come into place.
As an advertiser, you need to check your campaign on a daily basis, make sure that you have a very good quality score, that your keywords list is often updated, that your ad copy is relevant and that you are generating enough conversions to reach a 3:1 return on investment target.